Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
THE MAN WHO DELIVERED THE NORTH
Cast your mind back to 2022 and 2023. When the presidential ambition of Bola Ahmed Tinubu hung by a thread, one northern voice rose above all others to carry it across the line. Mallam Nasir El-Rufai, then Governor of Kaduna State, threw the full weight of his intellect, his network and his credibility behind the Tinubu project.
It was El-Rufai who galvanised the old CPC bloc, the Buhari political family of the far North, behind a Lagos candidate it had no natural reason to love. It was El-Rufai who defended the indefensible Muslim-Muslim ticket to a sceptical North. It was El-Rufai who cried out publicly against what he saw as sympathy for Atiku Abubakar within the Buhari Villa, openly accusing elements around the outgoing President of working to cripple Tinubu’s chances. And when the naira redesign policy threatened to strangle the Tinubu campaign in its cradle, it was El-Rufai who led fellow governors all the way to the Supreme Court against the government of his own party.
No man in Nigeria did more to make Tinubu president. The numbers prove it.
THE ARITHMETIC OF ONE MAN’S LABOUR
Look at the North East. Atiku swept five of its six states, Adamawa, Bauchi, Gombe, Taraba and Yobe. Tinubu salvaged only Borno, the home state of his running mate.
Look at the North West, El-Rufai’s own theatre of operations. Atiku won four states there, Kaduna, Katsina, Kebbi and Sokoto, while Kano went to Kwankwaso. Tinubu carried only Jigawa and Zamfara. Yet when the declared figures were totalled, Tinubu somehow emerged with the larger aggregate from the zone. Indeed, the North West gave Tinubu more votes than his own South West did. To this day, millions in the region believe, and the opposition maintained in its petitions, that votes were suppressed in the states Atiku won and inflated in the states credited to Tinubu. That conviction has never left the northern streets.
Look at the North Central, where the vote fragmented three ways among Tinubu, Atiku and Obi, allowing Tinubu to pick up Benue, Kogi, Kwara and Niger through the cracks.
Now do the final sum. Atiku won nine of the nineteen northern states and polled about 4.8 million northern votes. Tinubu won only seven, yet was credited with about 5.3 million votes from the North. Out of his declared national total of a little under 8.8 million, the North supplied the difference between victory and defeat. Remove that 5.3 million and Tinubu is reduced to roughly 3.5 million votes, behind Peter Obi’s 6.1 million and far behind Atiku’s nearly seven million. Without the North there is no Tinubu presidency. And without El-Rufai there was no Tinubu North.
The North gave Tinubu the crown. Tinubu has given the North a cage.
FROM MINISTERIAL NOMINEE TO INMATE
How was this labour repaid? By El-Rufai’s own public account, he had concluded plans to travel abroad for doctoral studies after leaving office in 2023. He has said the President personally prevailed on him to shelve that ambition, telling him the new administration needed him at home. He stayed. He was nominated for a ministerial position.
Then came the subterfuge. At the Senate, his nomination was quietly strangled on the strength of unexplained security reports that were never published, never tested, never substantiated. The nomination was never re-presented. The man who begged him to stay watched him humiliated on the national stage and lifted no finger. After El-Rufai achieved victory for Tinubu, Tinubu set about crippling El-Rufai.
Since February this year, the crippling has become literal confinement. He returned voluntarily from Cairo, only to have his passport seized at the airport. He honoured an EFCC invitation and was detained. When he was granted bail at night, operatives lay in ambush at the gate of the EFCC headquarters and whisked him into fresh custody. Cybercrime charges were hurriedly filed over remarks in a television interview. Remand orders have been renewed and renewed again. His family has alleged denial of doctors, food and visitors. An ADC delegation led by the party’s National Secretary was turned back from the ICPC headquarters. The party’s spokesman has said what millions suspect, that the ruling party has resolved not to release him until after the elections. Even Dr Hakeem Baba-Ahmed, a former presidential adviser, has called him what he is, a political prisoner.
JUSTICE WITH TWO FACES
Godswill Akpabio, trailed for years by weighty corruption allegations from his Akwa Ibom days, presides today over the Senate. Those allegations went quiet the moment he entered the ruling party’s warm embrace. Yahaya Bello, whom the EFCC itself accused of laundering tens of billions of naira of Kogi funds, walks free on bail and sleeps in his own bed.
Yet El-Rufai, facing charges his lawyers describe as bailable, is kept behind walls month after month, convicted of nothing, with bail conditions the opposition says are designed to be impossible. His real offence is plain: he joined the ADC and vowed that Tinubu would not be re-elected.
In Tinubu’s Nigeria, corruption allegations are a crime only when you are in opposition.
THE NORTH’S REWARD IS HUNGER
And what has the North received for crowning this presidency? Hunger without tribe or party card. Markets where a bag of rice mocks a monthly wage. Farmlands surrendered to bandits. Children withdrawn from school because parents must choose between books and bread. And when the people cry out, Bayo Onanuga and the presidential megaphones insist the hunger in their stomachs does not exist.
The North does not need Onanuga’s permission to feel its own hunger.
THE BALLOT IS THE KEY TO HIS CELL
Let it travel from Sokoto to Maiduguri, from Kano to Kaduna. If this government refuses to release Nasir El-Rufai before the election, only one instrument can open that cell door, and it is the ballot. On the sixteenth of January, 2027, the same 5.3 million northern votes that made Tinubu, and the millions more that were denied Atiku, must rise as one overwhelming protest. The North made this presidency with its own hands. With its own hands it can unmake it.
And let this be heard within our own house as well. The ADC and Atiku Abubakar must not abandon El-Rufai. He is now the living symbol of everything this contest is about, and his freedom must remain on the front page of the campaign until the day he walks out of that cell.
They can lock up one man. They cannot lock up the ballots of the North.
Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
Director General,
The Narrative Force
thenarrativeforce.org
12 July 2026
